Here’s How Boris Johnson Can Still Win
This isn’t the first time in his premiership Boris has been besieged on multiple fronts. To take just one example, in September 2019 he was having the constitutionality of the prorogation challenged, his affair with Jennifer Acuri scrutinised by the Metropolitan Police for ethical reasons, a negative majority in the Commons which would neither consent to his agenda nor a General Election, the Brexit Party still polling at 10–12%, and the very real possibility of the Opposition forming a caretaker government with or without his consent, and the complex task of rewriting Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement to satisfy all international and domestic partners. Partly due to missteps by his opponents, partly due to blind luck that Leo Varadkar caved and partly due to the strategising of his now deposed consigliere he defeated them all and emerged much stronger from the fight. Were it not to be overshadowed by, you know what, it would be considered one of the most astonishing tour de forces in the history of post-war British, maybe European politics.
Political predictions are for dummies. I’m not here to say that this latest barrage of scandal is noise, it could very well be signal. Government by Signal, and Whatsapp and text message, has been one of the problems, as some would see it, of Johnson’s majority government, the others being an antagonistic relationship with much of the Civil Service and the influence of Carrie Symonds. These underlying issues could be written of as the things that made Boris Johnson the shortest serving Prime Minister since Alec-Douglas Home, or they’ll be footnotes in a much longer book. Just because Boris keeps getting away with it in the past, doesn’t mean he will now.
So rather than definitively say he will survive this latest scrap unscathed, let’s imagine how he could survive this latest scrap unscathed.
1) The ‘bodies pile high’ comment
Pretty callous stuff. And it’s pretty obvious he said it, the denial line is going to last maybe a day longer. For many other kinds of leaders in more junior positions, maybe Chris Witty, such a comment would be terminal. It’s roughly the 30th anniversary of Gerald Ratner wiping £500 million off his own company with a series of ill-judged jokes and a poor handling of the issue by his PR people.
But at this point crazy outbursts from Boris are pretty much baked-in to voter calculations; the numerous gaffes or questionable jokes he’s made during this crisis has pretty much scotched any notion that Covid-19 will make him a serious statesmen in crisis in the mould of Churchill or FDR. For all the ‘callousness’ the media is currently moaning about, we expect in our leaders to make these tough decisions every day, which hospital to shut down, which benefits for the unemployed to keep or scrap, which mental health service to grant funding for, which country to invade or give aid to and, yes, which restrictions to implement to contain the spread of a deadly virus. All of these decisions have thousands, maybe millions of lives at stake. In a very British way, we expect our government ministers to make them without excessive displays of emotion or theatrics. It’s my hunch that, given Boris did actually order in a third lockdown in December, contrary to his October outburst, and he’s presumably been working 18 hour days every day for the last fourteen months, the voters, if not sympathise, will understand the outburst.
2) The Dyson Texts
This is the most absurd one. Is it ideal that a billionaire has text access to the PM and the ‘guy on the street’ doesn’t? Not really. But when Covid-19 was killing 1000 people a day, and every relevant stakeholder was screaming at the government to spend all the money humanly possibly to bring in ventilators, masks, gowns etc and bring them in yesterday, I think the voters are going to have the good sense to recognize that the PM and the CEO of a firm making ventilators having a quick text conversation and sorting out a minor tax issue was, on net, a good thing. If you want fast government, than ‘government by Whatsapp’ or ‘government by Signal’ is inevitable.
This by the way is also my attitude, and I suspect the attitude of many voters, around all the supposed ‘scandals’ of procurement. You can’t complain that the government isn’t going fast enough in March 2020, and then complain when it turns out they went around official channels and didn’t put every last contract to a competitve tender process.
3) Interfering in the ‘Chatty Rat Inquiry’
Dominic Cummings alleges that Henry Newman leaked the fact there was going to be a second lockdown in November to the media and that Boris Johnson was told as such by the Cabinet Secretary. Disliking the implications such a sacking would have on his domestic life, Boris (allegedly) asked for the inquiry to be scotched, to which DC responded with chagrin and accusations of amorality.
Unlike the texts and the ‘bodies hit the floor’ comments, we’re not sure if this is true. I generally trust DC more than I trust Boris Johnson, but I reckon after Barnard Castle I am very much in the minority on that one. I also think all Covid related issues, and this applies to this point and point 2, are very much under the rule of the famous motivational quote ‘it’s not how you start a race but how you finish it’.
Britain in the Covid-19 pandemic, much like Britain in WW1 and WW2, started off quite badly but may have made up for it in the end with a fast vaccine rollout and a long 3rd lockdown that has bought daily deaths into low-double digits. All of the drama of ‘herd immunity’, slow testing, March 2020, Tiers, circuit breakers, second waves, ruined Christmases, test and trace fails, 10pm rules, substantial meal requirements, third lockdowns and cold outdoor pints will, God Willing, all be forgotten in a few months. While the second lockdown did impact millions of people’s lives, what’s at stake here was not whether it happened or not but whether the guy who forewarned us all was treated in the appropriate way by the government. Like the ‘bodies piled high’ comments from the same time period, it just seems too small.
4) Downing Street Flat.
If it’s confusing to me, a political nerd, it’s not going to cut through. My understanding is that a Tory donor paid for some expensive refurb of No11, and that Boris paid said donor back, though he may have been initially reluctant to. While Carrie Symonds complaining of a ‘John Lewis furniture nightmare’ is hardly an ideal comment either for Boris’s personal relationship with Theresa May or the working class voters he hopes to woo in Hartlepool and the West Midlands metro Mayor election, taxpayer funds weren’t used and if the paperwork is retconned in time, then the specific /ethics/ of the flat issue is, well, flat.
5) His Personal Life.
In the last eighteen months, Boris Johnson has finalised a divorce with his wife of 27 years, become engaged to a woman twenty-five years his junior and had a new child. He has also nearly died, and is probably still living with the mental and physical toll last March inflicted upon him. This would probably be enough for any man to need to take a few years to adjust. While his fiance is a political player in her own right, it may end up being for the best if both of them take a step back and fix their own relationship. This would also help Boris’s own financial situation since he could acquire much better paid work as a scribbler, which I sense is his true passion.
It could be that, rather than points 1–4, what finally fells Boris is his own turbulent personal and financial affairs and that he becomes the first Prime Minister since Harold Wilson to resign of his own accord at a time and date of his choosing, to raise a new family and boost his income.
This would be, in a nutshell, how he wins. Handle 2 major crises in 2 years, go down as the best Prime Minister since Churchill, save football on St George’s Day, and get paid £5k a week to write nonsense for the Telegraph (or, get a Cameo account).
Conclusion
It could on the other hand be, before Boris goes into the sun voluntarily, that these scandals have a ‘delayed order’ effect, whereby, like Barnard Castle, they weaken the relevant individuals political capital within Wesminster and in the court of public opinion, allowing for their removal a few months after the fact. We could by the end of 2021 be watching Sunak be giving Covid press conferences as Prime Minister, not Chancellor.
Ok, I know I said I wasn’t going to make any predictions. All four of these are dynamic and could end up being much worse than we initially suspect. But to my mind scandals can either be cumulative or cancellative, and my gut feeling is that with Boris, and the war-time mentality we are still under, if none of them land a critical punch, then they don’t ‘stack up’ but if anything cancel eachother out as the voters see a load of noise buried in arcane ethical complaints. If Boris can push out there that, while under this assault, he managed to save football, that would probably matter more to his target voters more than all four of those ‘stories’ combined.
If Dominic Cummings can’t produce the goods in the May 26th Parliamentary hearing, which I’ll try and watch, Boris may just get away with it once more.
